


Lost Books of the Odyssey

by eudaimon



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:51:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brad is a rock music photographer looking for a change. After getting his heart broken, he goes backpacking across Europe, with barely more than his camera to guide him. He meets Nate, a student who has lost his focus and struck out searching answers. The journey brings them together and changes them both. It's a myth, of sorts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the desire to move

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Warbigbang 2011. Art by Lunatics_Word @ LJ.
> 
> This story was a long, long time in coming. When I was twenty years old, I packed a bag and I went around the world. I stood on the Taj Mahal in the pouring rain, ate ice-cream in Sydney Harbour. A little later, I took myself to Venice in winter to see a boy that I was (or thought I was, at least) in love with. He was the one who told me the story of St Theodore and his improbable crocodile.
> 
> This is a story that I'd been trying to write, in one way or another, for almost a decade. I didn't initially intend for it to become a Generation Kill story but I'm glad it found its place, its pace and its time to breathe. This is the story the way I meant to tell it, I think.
> 
> I'm glad it's there in the world.

_118° West:_

At first he thinks that he might forgive her, but then he realises that it's not going to be his decision. Not yet. Brad's been in love with Juli since he was twelve years old, but he's had a best friend for longer. On the day she leaves him, puts a few things into a cardboard box and refuses to let him carry them down two flights of stairs, he realises that he is physically unequipped to live life as it now presents itself to him. That, at least, is abundantly clear.

He throws necessities into his backpack.  
He picks up his camera and goes.

*

_#2: A line of people, waiting to board. Shoes, boots, slippers. Bags discarded. Arrows painted on the floor. One long line. Leaving on a one way ticket (LAX)._

There's enough in his account for the open ticket; six thousand dollars buys a lot of miles. There's a letter shoved into the hip pocket of his khakis that he hasn't had the balls to read yet; _read the letter, Brad_ , she said to him. _It'll all make more sense_. But they've known each other since they were kids, the three of them, so he can't see how any of this is ever supposed to ring true to him.

He isn't even angry, just wrung out and numb.  
In the airport, from behind, he sees a girl with white blond hair and narrow shoulders and he almost calls her name.

Everything left in the world is an echo.  
His plan is far from exact.

From L.A it might make more sense to go west but he's got no real interest in forging new paths or throwing his luck on the surface of the Pacific. He learned to surf as a kid. Too many times to count, they went down to the ocean together and, afterwards, snuck into his bed, and he kissed chill skin still laced with salt and sand.

He has a need for something else.  
He craves unfamiliar things.

He traces the edges of the envelope with his thumb. In line for security, he places a call.  
She answers on the fourth ring, and he can tell from the echo and the background noise that she's in the kitchen and, for a moment, he aches to be there, toeing off his boots in the mud-room, leaving his pack in the hall. He's photographed his mom in all parts of his parents' house, but she always looks most at home in the kitchen.

She takes it better than he'd imagine.

"Oh, honey," she says, and he imagines her hands stilled mid-mixing, her wedding ring placed carefully on the sill. "I love that girl, but she can be such a bitch."  
"You don't have to say that, Mom," he says, quietly.  
"But..."  
"Mom, don't."

She asks him if he's got his camera; he promises to call from each new country.

"I'll start in London," he says, because he's worked there, and he's got a couch to sleep on. He's been in London from time to time, hanging out in strange, smoky bars and shooting bands he's never heard of. He'd first picked up a camera dreaming of documenting wars; he's had to make do with drumbeats in place of conflict for a long time now.

"Call me when you get there," she says. "I love you, baby."  
"I love you too, Mom."

He hangs up in time to throw cellphone and wallet into the plastic tray. He toes out of boots already loose laced. He slips his netbook out of its case. It stays out while he buys coffee, tucked under one arm, and then he sets up at a table, rubs one hand back through his short hair while he waits for his email to load.

>   
> FROM: iceman74@gmail.com  
> TO:: trustinthebirds@gmail.com
> 
> Heading to London for a few days. Going on a trip. Any chance of a bunk for a day or two??
> 
> \- B.

Airports are transitory places; he sits at the table and watches everybody else swirl around him. He watches a young woman walk through the Duty Free store. She sniffs each perfume in turn. He finds himself comparing her to Juli; shorter, darker hair, fuller through the bust. He makes himself edit some pictures. He wonders how long it's going to be before everything stops reminding him of her.

More echoes.

They call his flight as he's finishing his coffee. He takes his time putting his laptop away. On impulse, he slips his camera out of its case. His phone buzzes in his pocket. The Reporter comes through.

He remembers to turn his phone off before he boards.

*

_not going to say it's not you it's me, Brad. We're better than that. You deserve better than that. I will say this: it's easier to love someone when they're here. I know you've got a career (and nobody thinks that's as AWESOME as I do) but I'm sick of going to bed on my own and I got so, so sick of you not being here. And Matt is here, Brad. He's always been here. And he's so kind._

_I still love you. Matt loves you too. I'm just not in love with you anymore. I_

*


	2. to be a stranger

_0°_

Heathrow feels the same as LAX and the two of them feel like every other airport that he's ever been in; they're nothing places, designed to facilitate onwards movement. Carrying a backpack on each shoulder, Brad walks smoothly down featureless white hallways. He gains speed with each moving walkway. It's not that he has a particular place to be - he's just done with being here.

He buys his ticket for the train into London from a smiling kid in a navy jacket. He shifts the weight of his bags and presses his ear-buds into place. He listens to a song that he doesn't remember putting on his iPod. Standing waiting for the train, he turns on his camera and methodically deletes every photo of Juli or Matt still saved on the memory. It's petty and it makes him feel like shit but at least he's doing something and it's measureable and it's done. 

The train is almost silent when it arrives. It's so quick that he's gone before he's even got time to sit down.  
Nobody checks his ticket.

*

Reporter’s been living in London for so long that he’s started to pick up bad habits; he uses ridiculous curse words and leaves shitty tips. Some clichés become clichés because, at the root, they’re basically true. They drink beer in a bar in Camden; Reporter idly scrawls in a notebook and Brad keeps his eyes on the door, feeling neat and out of place.

“So what’s the plan, Brad?” asks the Scribe, asks Evan Wright, who filed a piece for Rolling Stone two years ago and pretty much made his name on the back of it. Brad wishes that he had that kind of journalistic luck; he longs to ship out to somewhere like Iraq or Afghanistan and shoot shit that actually matters, events that are actually relevant instead of music that just thinks it is. There are revolutions going off like cluster-bombs. Sometimes, Brad feels it almost painfully: the need to document a generation and not just follow in its wake.

And Johnny Rotten’s selling real estate in California; Joe Strummer’s in the ground. Punk died while none of them were paying attention.  
At some point, they stopped being young.

“There is no plan,” he says, finally. “But I think I’ll go south. Pick up a bike and go.”  
“Then what?”  
“You sound like you’re preparing to write a piece on me.”

Reporter gives him a very definite look.

“It’s a conversation, Colbert. People have them every day.”

Brad finds himself smiling before he means to. He knows that nobody back home is waiting  
to read about him.

“I honestly don’t know,” he says. “I’ve done the U.K. I’ve done Dublin.” He’s in no mood for James Joyce.

“Paris is nice?”  
“Fuck Paris.”  
“Amsterdam?” 

Brad shrugs; unlike a lot of guys in his life of work, he’s not really into weed. HIs body is a temple (bullshit). He’s always preferred it when his head is clear.

“Venice is a fun town.”

He thinks about it. He has no particular problem with Italy and it would be a long drive down; good roads but not too straight. He suspects that what he needs now is a bike underneath him and the wind too loud to think past. He thinks it would probably be best if there was no room in his head for her at all. No room for either of them.

He nods.

“I could try Venice,” he says. He drains the last of his beer; it’s his turn to go to the bar. The girl who’s working is tall and skinny, her hair shaved to a soft buzz, silver rings decorating her lip and eyebrow. She’s got beautiful sleeve tattoos on both arms. She looks like a person done entirely in coloured ink, like an illustration from an art book. She leans across the bar when she talks to him, her Clash t-shirt strategically ripped to show the shadows between her breasts.

“What brings you to Camden?” she asks him.  
“Just passing through,” he says, picking up the beers and leaving a solid tip behind.

More than any other time in his life, he feels transparent and alone.

_#15: one girl, cloth in hand, wiping down a long, dull bar. Little colour in the shot except for the ink on her arms. “All of This is Imaginary – London”._

*  
 _12° East:_

_#22: standing water and reflected buildings at the edge of St Mark's Square. One pair of boots reflected in the lower right corner._

Venice is not all that it's cracked up to be. For a start, it's freezing; the wind blows in off the water and howls along the Grand Canal. He wears layers under his leather and still finds himself tight and chill. On the Rialto, he stops at a stall loaded down with thick wool scarves and paws through the heavy contents of the table until he comes up with a slouchy grey knit watch-cap that he pays for with a five Euro note and pulls down over his short hair.

So at least his ears are warm.

He eats in a tiny restaurant with the menu written only in Italian; prawns fried in oil with garlic and chilli, baby octopus with ink sauce and polenta. He drinks red wine, espresso and Grappa and leaves a generous tip. It's a short walk back to the Rialto, glowing green in the night, and deserted now that the tourists have gone back to hotels in Trieste and the stall-keepers have gone back home to their food and their families. Brad walks slowly with his camera in his hand and his knuckles reddened and sore. He pauses and takes a picture of a girl standing in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, her head tilted so that her hair slips across her eyes. As he lowers his camera, she catches sight of him. She raises the hand holding the cigarette and waves to him. She smiles.

He thinks that he smiles back.

By the time St Mark's square opens up in from of him, he's cold enough to be pissed off about it and he almost turns right around and goes back to his hotel. Something makes him stay. During the day, the piazza is almost unbearable, thronged with tourists and pigeons, edged with overpriced coffee-shops and bars. He went into the Doge's palace and took photographs, stood for a moment on the Bridge of Sighs. He felt nothing so much as lonely and punch-drunk. 

At midnight, though, the whole character of the place is different. It's deserted; even the pigeons are gone. There's no sound but the scuff of his boots as he crosses the paving stones. The lights are reflecting in the standing water that's started to creep in. Earlier, an Italian waiter told him that, in a matter of days, the whole square would be under water. It's been happening for years.

Somehow, Brad finds it comforting to think that some things never change.

He's standing roughly in the middle of the square, head tipped back, looking up at the Campanile when he realises that he's not actually alone. Folded into a corner, knees drawn up and head down, there's a kid writing in a notebook. In the weak light, Brad can make out pea-coat and striped scarf. There's a hat discarded on the step next to him. Hair pushed into fingered furrows.

Brad's got his camera up before he even knows what he's doing.

(The picture ends up blurry and off-centre, more scarf than face, hands, notebook, pen and the reflection of boots in the standing water).

He clears his throat and lowers his camera, embarrassed. It's in his muscle memory, learned for a thousand repetitions. He takes pictures quicker than he thinks.

"Sorry," he says.

He corrects himself on 'kid' as soon as the other guy looks up; there's something about his posture that made him look younger than he clearly is. He's got one of those open faces, under short, neat hair, wool pulled up under the point of his chin. He looks at the camera and then he smiles.

Brad finds himself distracted.

"Can I see it?"

Brad thinks about saying _no_ , being precious about it because he hasn't even looked at it himself yet and because, sometimes, he likes to pretend that he's an artist. He finds himself sitting down on the step, working his camera with quick, practised fingers. He finds the photo and turns the camera to show the view-screen. It's not a good shot; the focus is off, the light is wrong. On a normal day, he'd delete it out of hand but, today, something makes him keep it. And he lets the guy look.

"I like it," says the other guy, closing his notebook and covering it with both hands. As an afterthought, he reaches out and snags his hat, pulling it down over his curling hair, before he reaches out and offers Brad his hand.

"I'm Nate," he says, and there's a flicker of that smile again. "Nate Fick."  
"Brad." He takes Nate's hand, shakes. Nate's fingers are long and chill. Brad doesn't examine the fact that he finds himself faintly unwilling to let go. He blames it on his bruised heart and the fact that Nate is close and warm and has a gorgeous smile.

He's a fucking idiot.

They sit in silence for a moment; it's the uneasy silent of strangers who've put themselves in each other's company and find themselves not quite able to find something to say. A group of college-age kids, not much younger than Nate, go traipsing across the square, linked arm in arm, trailing scarves and coat-tails. Brad watches them go and then he turns to look at Nate, who's got this distant look on his face. 

"Fuck it," says Brad, seized by the desire to do _something_ that's nothing to do with Juli or Matt or the letter that's still in his pocket. "Do you want to go get coffee or something?"  
Right after he's said it, he's struck by the fact that he might have done something completely and utterly ridiculous.

But Nate's already slipping his notebook into his bag.

"Sure," he says. "Let's go."

Brad pushes to his feet and holds out his hand.

*

Over coffee in a little place with half the chairs on the tables already, Brad learns the basics. Nate is twenty-five, he's from Baltimore, he's an only child but there are a lot of cousins. He's been at Harvard for a year, studying for a PhD but, recently, he's lost faith in himself and what the fuck he's trying to achieve so he’s signed out of his life, sabbatical for a year, going to figure it all out. They've told him that he'll be allowed to come back; he’s assured of this. He's been in Italy for a week, in Venice for a day, and he's already sick of being alone in shitty hotels.

(He says all of this in a rush, voice low, diction clear and precise. He cradles his _cafe corretto_ with graceful, long fingered hands. Brad finds his own fingers itching for his camera again).

"Bored yet?" Nate asks. Brad's amazed to shake his head; he's not. For twelve years, him and Juli were on and off and, sometimes, there were girls but, more often, guys like Nate, young and luminous in little ways. Girls who weren't Juli never really did it for Brad, maybe never would again but, when he realises that he's still attracted to guys like Nate, he takes it as a good sign.

Of course, for all he knows, Nate Fick is straight as an arrow.

After coffee, they move on to beer, Peroni in frosted bottles; Brad tries not to be distracted by the way that Nate's mouth fits against the green glass. They shoot the shit; Brad talks about the ride down through France and how much he now hates anything French. He watches as Nate methodically shreds the labels from every bottle on the table. The owner brings over cocktails, virulent red, served in squat, heavy glasses, sharp with bitters and Campari.

When asked what they are, he just shrugs and says, "Venetian."  
Brad watches the way that Nate's full lips purse because he takes another swallow.

"I don't know what I'm doing here," admits Nate. "I miss knowing what the fuck I'm doing."  
"We all feel like that, sometimes," says Brad, lifting his glass and draining off what's left, diluted by melting ice. "Why the fuck do you think I'm in fucking _Venice_ trying to figure out how far my bank-account can get me?"

Nate tilts his head and his cheeks are flushed with how much he's had to drink and Brad wants to lean across the table and brush that hair back from his eyes.

"Why are you here?" Nate asks, and Brad isn't sure if he means in-country or in-bar or at-this-table-right-here. He shifts in his chair, outside of his knee brushing the inside of Nate's. He's looking Nate straight in the eye but he's sure he feels Nate's legs shift wider apart.

"I'm looking for something I didn't have before," he says, and it's half the truth, and it's enough.

The owner apologises politely; it's past time for him to close. Nate pulls out his wallet but, in the end, it's Brad who pays. Outside, Nate's standing with his back to the wall, shoulders hunched, chin buried in his scarf. On impulse, Brad leans in against him with one shoulder, ducks his head. The chill tip of his nose grazes Nate's cheek. Nate turns his head. Brad breathes in before he kisses him, chill lips to chill lips. There's a moment's hesitation before he feels Nate kiss him back.

So not straight as an arrow then.

They stay there, crushed into a corner, kissing hard with Nate’s hands chill against the sides of Brad's neck. Nate kisses like he’s hungry, like he’s desperate for it, the full length of his body pressed against Brad’s. Their boots scuff against each other. Brad stops noticing how fucking cold it is. He pushes forward against Nate’s body, shoves with his hips and, for a moment, regrets all of the layers of clothes that they’re both wearing against the cold.

When they break the kiss because they have to, because both of them are breathless, Nate rests his forehead against Brad’s and he’s breathless and flushed, laughing a little, both of them in beanies with red noses, pressed together like teenagers.

“Come on,” says Nate, snagging Brad’s gloved hand in his. “I want to show you something.”

They end up back in St Mark’s square. On a whim, Brad pulls his coat open and Nate slips his hands inside, fingers linked in the small of Brad’s back. Close together, half inside each other’s coats, they share body-heat and Brad can only blame so much on what they drank. He looks at Nate; Nate looks up.

“St Mark wasn’t always the patron saint of Venice,” he says, and Brad follows his eye-line to the statues on the columns with their backs to the canal. “They had St Theodore.” He points and Brad follows his eye.

“What the fuck is that with him?”  
“That,” says Nate, sounding pretty amused, “is a crocodile. Modelled by someone who had never seen a crocodile.”  
“Why does he have a crocodile?”

Nate shrugs and his arms tighten a little.

“I’ve never figured that out.” He starts to pull away from Brad, hands dragging against his waist. “I should be getting back.”

Brad surprises himself by leaning in and taking another kiss, slower and deeper, this time, his lips lingering against Nate’s until after he’s done.

“You don’t have to,” he murmurs. “My room’s big enough for two.”  
He concentrates on how far he feels from Juli, right then.

Just for a moment.

*  
Just inside the doorway of the hotel room, he leans his weight against Nate, cradles his face in his hands and presses against him with his hips. Nate sucks on his bottom lip, his hands already on Brad’s hips. They’re both wearing so many layers, both wrapped up so, so tight. There’s a heat to Nate that Brad wasn’t anticipating; he let the damp cold distract him. He pulls away from Nate for long enough to shrug out of his jacket. Nate’s pea-coat hits the floor. Brad unwinds his scarf and brushes his fingers against the unguarded skin of Nate’s throat.

“I don’t know anything about you,” he murmurs, pulling Nate out of his sweater, starting to work on the buttons of his shirt. Underneath, Nate is pale and smooth. 

“I told you my whole fucking life story,” he says, breathless, laughing against his bitten lip.

But that’s just biography and it doesn’t count for shit.

He twists his fingers around Nate’s, tugs him away from the wall. His jeans ride low on his hipbones. Under all of the layers of clothes it was difficult to tell the shape of Nate but now Brad’s got him half-bare, he can’t stop looking. He trails his fingers up over Nate’s ribs and grazed his thumb against one of Nate’s nipples.

Their hips jerk together.

It’s on the tip of Brad’s tongue to ask Nate what and how he likes but he catches himself at the last moment. He shifts, presses his hand against the outline of Nate’s hard cock through his jeans. He rubs his fingers against Nate’s hard-on and watches the faint flush start to rise in his cheeks. He takes a step forward and presses Nate backwards towards the bed.

It’s amazing how willingly Nate goes.

On the edge of the bed, they finish the job of stripping each other down to skin. Brad watches as Nate bends his head and grazes his lips against the butterfly tattooed on his bicep. His sister’s got the exact same thing. It was her way of making him feel more connected, the year he went to find his birth-mother and came straight back home again.

He pushes his fingers into Nate’s hair and pulls him into a warm, slow kiss. His hand rests against Nate’s chest, palm against the racing of Nate’s heart.

They lie down together, side by side on the bed. They lean in closer until the tips of their noses touch, until Brad can feel Nate’s breath against his lips. In the square, he’d imagined something rough and hard, Nate shoved up against the wall, Nate’s thigh pulled up against his hip, buried balls deep in Nate’s body and rushing towards something head-long.

And this is nothing like that at all.

He shifts his hips, his thigh pressing between Nate’s, his fingers grazing down the flat of Nate’s belly. Nate’s fingers follow the curve of Brad’s spine and down, dipping into the cleft of his ass. Brad’s hips press forward and his cock grazes against Nate’s. He closes his eyes and breathes against Nate’s mouth and can’t imagine anything better in the world.

*

They’re on the boat early. It’s only a ten minute ride to the first island but Brad’s never been interested in crafts, not glass or lace. He hangs back while Nate walks down the street ahead of him. He raises his camera as though he’ll take a photograph of Nate standing on a bridge, looking down at the water, but he doesn’t. He keeps replaying last night in his mind. He can’t help but wish that he’d walked away instead of having breakfast with Nate that morning. It all feels too much like backsliding; it all feels a little close to everything that he’s running away from. Nate keeps glancing at him like he knows that something’s wrong. Brad turns his back and takes a photograph of the houses of the sky.

They don’t stay on Murano or Burano for long.

Back on the boat, the fog is white and tight and everywhere. Sounds come back dull and somehow cold. There is a space between where Brad’s gloves end and the cuffs of his coat begin and his skin feels tight and strange, like his wrists are marooned or something. Turned half away from Nate, he leans his chill chin on his chill wrist and squints across the water to where a little craft is going very slowly. None of the boats are going very quickly but that little boat is moving so gradually that everything will already have happened by the time that it gets anywhere. Brad sympathises. He shoves her hands deep down into her coat pockets and scowls at the back of the seat in front. 

At his side, Nate is silent.

They’re the last ones off the boat. Brad’s fingers twitches at his side and he almost takes Nate’s hand but he stops himself at the last minute. It was one fuck and companionship the next day, deal fucking done. He doesn’t need it to be anything more that. He’s not sure that he could take it. 

There’s a path that curves in a wide semi-circle. Gravel crunches under the soles of their boots. They walk close enough that their shoulders bump together. He doesn’t pull away.

“They stole St. Mark,” says Nate, glancing over at Brad when he says it. “From Alexandria. And then St. Mark stole Venice from St. Theodore.”

Brad finds himself grinning.

“Pretty fucking ninja,” he says.

There’s a sudden scudding shower and they run, round the hedges and over the bridges and past the rock that’s just a rock and up the Cathedral steps. After dashing, they take a moment, both of them breathing hard and grinning. Nate reaches out and pulls off his hat and then he leans in and grazes his mouth with a soft kiss. Brad doesn’t pull away.

He has no idea what he wants here but he knows that Nate Fick is part of it.

The Cathedral is pretty fucking beautiful and he finds himself staring up at the mosaic of the Madonna veiled in black and gold. He was raised Jewish but his parents…never really bothered. He’s never really seen the point of religion. He’s always preferred to trust in himself.

“I was raised Catholic,” says Nate, walking down the aisle and, inexplicably, he’s carrying a tabby cat in his arms. He scratches it behind the ears. It purrs and pushes its skull into the cup of his hand. He pauses, bends his head to read a plastic plaque.

“Says here that they stole the mosaic from Byzantium,” he says. “They didn’t bother to measure the gap.”  
“…Which is why she’s got no feet,” says Brad, head tilted to one side.

Not quite so fucking ninja.  
He sits there for a moment, watching Nate with the cat before he realises that what’s really trying to do is work out the way to ask Nate to sit down.

_Sweetheart. Come here and sit beside me._

*  
He walks Nate back to his hotel. They don’t hold hands but they do hook their fingers around each other for a few seconds at a time and then they let them go. It’s not like he hasn’t fucked anybody but Juli; it’s more that he has fucked anyone that _mattered_ and all of this is so surprising.

Nate Fick is an unknown quality.  
Brad’s never really trusted an unknown quality.

The hotel is part of an old monastery. In an archway, Nate pulls him close by the lapels of his coat and kisses the side of his face. Brad’s lips tighten like they’re waiting. He brushes his fingers through Nate’s short hair, combing it back from his forehead.

“Stay,” says Nate, a little smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.  
“I shouldn’t,” says Brad, because he has no idea where this is leading and he’s not ready and he tries not to be an asshole. He tries so, so hard.  
“But you will,” says Nate.

*  
He ends up on his knees, hands on Nate’s hips, kissing down over the press of his dick against his jeans. He hooks the tips of his fingers over Nate’s waistband, pressing against warm skin. Fingers brush over his hair and he smiles, mouth open. He moves one hand, tracing his fingers back along the seam of Nate’s jeans, pressing firm against his perineum, rubbing against the cleft of his ass. He heard Nate’s breath catch and then Nate’s hands were there, unbuttoning and unzipping his own fly, spreading his pants around his hips.

“How many guys have sucked your dick?” asks Brad, pulling at the top of Nate’s underwear. White cotton, of course.

Above him, looking down, Nate blushes. It’s pretty fucking endearing.

“Enough,” he says.

Brad doesn’t have anything else to say. He closes his eyes and slides his mouth down over the first inch of Nate’s dick. It’s another thing that’s got nothing to do with anything that he ever did with Juli. He doesn’t want romance and he doesn’t really want connections. The girl he’s loved since high school’s just broken his heart and what he needs now is the weight of Nate’s dick on his tongue, the way he shifts his hips and presses one hand across his mouth to keep from moaning.

Because they’re in an old monastery. There’s something sweet about that that aches in the pit of his belly.

Goddamn.

He doesn’t take his time over it. He doesn’t mean to linger. He pushes his hands down the back of Nate’s pants, squeezes the firm muscle of his ass, presses the tips of his fingers against his asshole. With no lube, he doesn’t go any further than that but it’s enough to make Nate squirm. Brad shoves a hand down inside his own pants, wraps his fingers around his dick and jerks slowly, an infuriating counter-rhythm to the slide of his mouth on Nate. There’s the finest tremble that starts in Nate’s hips and his hands but that’s the only warning that Brad gets before he comes over Brad’s tongue. He swallows it straight down. 

He stays on his knees, his head resting against Nate’s belly, eyes closed, and it doesn’t take long before he’s finished, wiping his hand on his t-shirt.

“I wanted to do that,” says Nate and Brad doesn’t have the words to say _yeah, but this wasn’t about you_.

Not long after that, Nate’s asleep, curled on his side with his knees drawn up and Brad pulls his camera out of his messenger bag. In the morning, there’ll be a conversation, a decision to stick with Nate for a while which will make him neither happy nor sad. It’s forward movement. It’s momentum. He’ll go back to his hotel in a borrowed t-shirt and pick up his bag and go.

_#71: A body and a white sheet. Shoulder like a mountain. Chin tucked down towards the chest. The side of a beautiful face. White skin in an otherwise dark room, picked out in flash._

No miracles here but something else instead.


	3. Interlude: Doc

He finds Nate smoking in the window of the kitchen. He knows that he’s Mike’s friend (though he’s never quite figured out how that came to be the case). He doesn’t know how they’re connected past that. Nate wears worn punk t-shirts and scuffed sneakers and it reminds Tim Bryan of being seventeen, eighteen, cooking dinner for a kid brother and figuring out what he wanted to be.

And somehow it’s ten years later and he still doesn’t know.  
But he’s closer.

“How’s it going?” he asks, non-committal, heading to the fridge and finding half a glass of mango lassi that’s cold and sweet. He drinks it through a straw and immediately feels a little happier.

“It’s going,” says Nate, and blows smoke out of the corner of his mouth.

“You’re too fucking young to talk like that,” says Tim, sitting on the kitchen table, drinking his wife’s drink and watching this kid smoking. He smokes like someone who hasn't done it much before.

And then Brad walks out of the building, football in hand, and Tim watches Nate become uncertain again. He wears no ring, went through no ceremony, only thinks of her as his wife, but, in eight years, Sharahah’s never made him feel like that.

He turns his back on them. The way they edge around each other is like dancing.  
There’s maybe an inch of sunshine-yellow lassi left in the cup.

*

It’s exhausting, the way they dance around each other. They make his fucking head ache. He spends all day with the kids. He does check-ups and he plays ball-games in the courtyard. He spend a long, shady hour with a sniffling toddler on his hip, leaned against the far wall, watching the boys play cricket in the street. 

They’re raised by an American and an Iranian. God knows where they got fucking _cricket_.

And then there’s two new kids, old enough to know better, cluttering up the place and making him tired. In the cool of the evening, their babies down for the night, he finally feels like he has a moment to breathe. He’s never really learned the art of standing still, which is why she’s always been a godsend, with her stillness and her grace. In the courtyard, she’s painting, a mural of leaves and water and kohl-eyed dancing girls. He remembers telling her, once, that Iraq hadn’t looked much like the cradle of civilisation by the time he got there (and it had been the memory of _that_ which drew him _here_ and all things had synchronicity when you viewed them side by side.

_Bullshit_ , he remembered her saying. _We carry our history with us on our backs_.

“Were we ever that fucking stupid?” he says, his hand easily finding the silver of brown skin between her t-shirt and her cotton skirt.

“We were pretty fucking stupid,” she says, grinning, “and I never even doubted you for a second.”

And she’s right; they snapped together like magnets. They drew each other close.

“It’s exhausting,” he says, flopping down into one of the worn deck chairs. “Watching them fail to figure out one of the fucking simplest things… _the_ fucking simplest thing.”

That they wanted and were wanted in return.

He sat back and watched as she painted a delicate scarlet flower. Her hair slipped forward and ;she tucked it behind one ear.

“I don’t like him,” he says.  
“Which?”  
“Brad. Nate’s a baby, but Brad…he’s old enough to know better.”

Carefully, she sets down her paintbrush and comes to him, lifts her skirt and slides astride his lap. His hand skims her waist and the dip of her tailbone.

“Maybe,” she says. “He only thought he’d been in love before, thought he understood, and then Nate washed up on some wave and he’s been drowning ever since.” She combs her fingers through his dark hair, her nails scratching at his scalp. “My Mother used to say that love is like a ship; you journey.”

She rolled one shoulder in a shrug.

“So he’s fucking sea-sick? If he is, Nate’s suffering for it.”  
“Well, he would be,” she says, simply. “He’s the tide.”

And then she cradles his face in her hands and bends to kiss him.

His Mom always acted like love was some great fucking compromise.  
But it’s never come to that.

*  
In the early morning, the light is watery and grey. They catch the last breath of air before the sun rises, standing on the platform, waiting for the train south. Nate’s t-shirt is inside out and Mike reaches out and tweaks the label at the nape of his neck. There are dark shadows under Brad’s eyes but, at least, he’s smiling.

Sharahah’s sent lunch and they shoulder it with the rest of their bags. Brad stifles a yawn against the back of his hand and takes a photograph of the three of them shooting the shit, Nate smoking a last cigarette.

“Go, safe,” says Mike, clapping Nate on the shoulder.

Tim offers Brad his hand. He doesn’t say it, but he’s thinking it.  
 _Figure shit out._


	4. to make a friend

_72° East_

They pass through Margoa and on. It feels like they’ve been on the train forever, but at least it’s air-conditioned and Nate sits with one foot hooked between Brad’s ankles. Opposite him, Brad’s sleeping. He reads a battered copy of Herodotus. With a stub of pencil, he underlines _circumstances rules men; men do not rule circumstances_. With his knee resting against Brad’s, it’s never felt truer.

In the sultry heat, Brad’s stripped down to cargo shorts and a wife-beater. On his leg, there’s a tattoo of a fat bird, wings spread. On his bicep, there’s the words ‘Semper Fidelis’. Nate leans forward, reaches out and brushes it with his fingers.

“I’ve always wanted a tattoo,” he says, thumb pressed against the warmth of Brad’s skin. Brad pushes his Oakleys up onto the top of his head and opens his eyes. He leans his head against the seat and looks at Nate for a long moment. The expression in his pale eyes is unreadable but soft; a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth.

“What would you get?” he asks.

Nate’s actually known the answer to this question for a while. In the corner of the compartment, there’s a kid with his head nodding, hat pulled low, headphones firmly in place.

“Look,” says Nate, pointing him out. He waits until Brad’s following his eye-line. “I read a book once that said that the only reason that people wear headphones is so they don’t miss having conversations. We’re fucking terrified of being on our own in the world.” He shrugs. 

It’s like a perfect metaphor for their time together so far.

He idly sketches it on a blank page in the back of his book as they roll onwards. The headphones, the wire to coil around his bicep and the words written in strong, neat capitals. No chance of them being misread.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

*  
They fuck in a rickety bed that rocks and hits the wall with every thrust, every rock of his hips. Nate pushes his fingers into Brad’s hair and tugs, turns his head and sucks up a mark just under his jaw. Brad moans and he feels the way that Brad’s hips jerk forward. Nate’s heel digs into the back of Brad’s thigh hard enough to bruise. His back arches and his fingers press into Brad’s broad shoulders and he moans loud enough that he knows that they have to be able to hear it in the hallway, maybe in the small walled garden too. He doesn’t give a shit. He can’t care. He only feels like this while he’s fucking Brad, feels on the edge of something that he doesn’t quite comprehend. He feels a laugh trying to bubble its way past his lips.

Coming, he presses a kiss against that bruise on Brad’s jaw.   
Clinging, he’s so dazed that he barely registers when Brad turns his head away and doesn’t kiss him back.

Afterwards, Brad stands at the mirror and examines, probing. He frowns.

“Why would you do that?” he asks.

Lying naked in tangled sheets, Nate feels strange and loose, dizzy and un-rooted in the thickness of the heat. There’s come and sweat drying on his skin and he feels beautiful and flying apart, all at once.

He lifts his head and looks at the bruise on Brad’s jaw, feels a twinge, a memory of excitement, in his belly.

“Why wouldn’t I?” he asks. “If we’re together, we’re together, and you don’t give a shit. If we’re not…” He lets his head fall back against the pillow and closes his eyes rather than look at Brad through the open door. “Well, then, there’s no fucking point, is there, Brad?”

And Brad had sounded like he was enjoying it at the time.

“It’s something kids do,” says Brad, still studying the bruise in the mirror. “Kids mark each other up to show the whole wide world that somebody fucking wants them.”

And then he goes to take a shower.  
A tiny bit at a time, Nate feels less beautiful.

He rolls out of bed without looking at Brad, tugs on jeans with no underwear, a t-shirt without showering first. He pushes his fingers back through his hair and snags his wallet, his watch. He deliberately leaves his cell-phone half tucked under the pillow. He sits on the edge of the bed to tug on his sneakers.

He leaves without another word. He brings Herodotus with him.

*

At first, he doesn’t want to look but then he finds that he can’t look away. He finds the way that blood and ink smears fascinating. The sensation is weird, a scratch and then a bone deep ache, somehow both more or less more painful that he was expecting it to be. 

His heart races. There’s a pulsing throb in the pit of his belly and, linked, there’s the image of Brad’s body above him in the bed, the long lines of Brad’s muscles, the flicker of a smile in the corner of his mouth when he moaned.

And Nate doesn’t want to think about him. There’s an embarrassed blush in his cheeks just remembering the way Brad spoke to him.

He focuses on the tattooist instead. He introduced himself as Ray. He’s lithe and rangy, tight muscles in his bare arms and dark hair slicked back to leave the lines of his face spare and beautiful. In a black wife-beater, his tattoos are obviously, tightly muscled arms spangled with jewel-like colours. A wrist full of black rubber bangles. A silver Hamsa pendant. Latex gloves. He swabs the half-done tattoo, takes a good look at his work and shifts his weight on his stool. He flashes a nervous-energy grin.

“Cool design, man,” he says. “It’s going to look fucking great.”

Nate grins.

“I always wanted one.”  
“You’ll never stop at one, Homes,” says Ray, needle buzzing as he leans in again. “They’re worse than Junk.”

There’s a Buddha tattooed on Ray’s right shoulder, fat and happy. Even though she’s Catholic, Nate’s mom has one in the kitchen. Nate remembers doing homework for AP English at the counter, watching her reach out and rub its little round belly before she slid bread dough into the oven.

Without thinking about it, he reaches out and grazes the tips of his fingers against Ray’s smooth tan skin.

When the tattoo is done, Ray tapes Saran Wrap into place, Nate stands at the counter, aware of the fine tremble in his hands as he watches Ray handwrite a receipt on carbon paper. He wraps it around a tube of cream and secures it with an elastic band.

“How long’re you in Goa?” asks Ray, leaning his weight back against the counter, making the muscles in his arms stand out and Nate is distracted by how much he wants his mouth on the lines of Ray’s tattoos. He wants to know if Ray tastes of sweat or something else and he could blame it on Brad, on how careless and cool he can be, but, really, he thinks it’s because Ray’s tattoos are beautiful but not as beautiful as his dark eyes and, when he smiles, his whole face changes.

“I don’t know,” he says, honest. “I could just be passing through.”  
“Well,” says Ray, turning to rummage through a sheaf of papers behind the counter. “If you manage to last the night, Homes, you should definitely think about coming by.”

He holds the flyer out to Nate. 

It’s a Full Moon Party, naming a beach that Nate thinks isn’t too far away.  
It might feel good to be out of his head for a while, to dance and feel his feet sinking into the wet, warm sand.

“Are you going to be there?” he asks, feeling redundant because of _course_ Ray’s going to be there. Of course he is. Because Nate’s old enough and he’s been wanted often enough that he can recognise that look in somebody else’s face.

“Fuck yes, I’ll be there,” says Ray and, when Nate actually takes the flyer, their fingers brush and he feels an answering throb in his cock.

*

The music has a pulse, a fucking heartbeat and his head is spinning, his arms up over his head, his fingers flexing for the sky. The thin stuff of his t-shirt is stuck across his chest and shoulders, his hair pushed back. He grazes shoulders and elbows. He can’t remember the last time he saw Brad in the press. His heels sink into the damp sand and he dances and he dances and, overhead, the moon is heavy and full.

Somebody takes hold of him by the hips and it’s a moment before they press in close against his back.

Without even looking, he knows that it’s not Brad. This body is smaller, skinnier, hotter and closer and the hands on his hips waste no time in slipping under his t-shirt, fingertips grazing against his bare belly. He reaches back with one hand, touches longer hair swept back, shaved down to a bristle behind the delicate curl of an ear.

“Ray,” he says, and the music’s still throbbing, still pulsing, and Ray’s hips moves to it and he pulls Nate with him when he goes.  
“Told you I’d be here,” says Ray, his chin against Nate’s shoulder as they sway and Nate finds himself swaying. Maybe it’s the pills in his system or the alcohol or the moon, left over adrenaline from the tattooing or the fact that he’s hear, he’s fucking here, on a beach in Goa and this was never supposed to be his life.

But here he is.

It’s not quite dancing, what they’re doing. They move in time. Nate pulls away but only enough to turn. Ray’s tattoos are showing through the slashed, ragged fabric of his t-shirt. His skin is tan and smooth. Nate curls his arms around Ray’s neck, holding him close and one of Ray’s hands stays on his hip but the other pushes upwards, under the sweaty layer of his shirt, following the line of his spine.

“What did you take?” asks Ray, and Nate can’t quite remember but it was small and white and it filled his blood with sparks. He doesn’t answer; he can’t answer. He sways in and kisses Ray, off-centre and sloppy but Ray turns his head and it instantly becomes surer, truer, the kind of kiss that he’s wanted with Brad but hasn’t ever had because anything he wants always gets lost in the noise of his heart the minute that Brad comes near.

With Ray, somehow, he can hear himself think.  
And what he’s thinking is things like _now_ and _yes I will Yes_.

They’re still kissing and Ray’s thigh is pressing forward between his and, somehow, they’re still dancing. Nate’s so happy that he feels like he can’t breathe.

“I’m done,” he mumbles, so close that his mouth still smudges against Ray’s. Sharing breath. 

Ray pulls back far enough to look him in the face, puzzled, both eyebrows raised, dark eyes quizzical but good humoured too. 

“You’re done? I mean, shit, Homes, consent can be withdrawn at any time, but I was kind of hoping, you know?”

Nate laughs, low and breathless, and shakes his head.

“I’m done with dancing,” he says.

Ray leans in and steals another kiss, this one softer and slower, and he nudges forward with his hips. Nate’s smiling, his heart shooting off light in every direction and it’s got nothing to do with love but everything to do with being wanted without reservation.

Ray’s palm grazes against the back of Nate’s hand and their fingers thread together.

*

Ray’s place isn’t much to write home about: four walls, a shabby makeshift kitchen, a rumpled bed. Ray strips out of his shirt as soon as he’s through the door, drops it on the floor and leaves it in a heap, sweat-damp and unnecessary. He’s skinny and lithe, decorated with stark lines across arms and chest and jutting hip-bones. He’s fucking beautiful, but in a very different way to Brad. Nate traces his fingers against his still-healing tattoo. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s sensitive enough to make his breath catch.

“Do you want anything?” asks Ray, reaching out and touching his hip with one hand. “You want a drink.”

“No,” says Nate. He doesn’t want a drink. He turns to Ray and catches him with one hand by the back of his neck, pulling him in for the kind of kiss he wants to give Brad, wishes he’d given Brad, open mouthed and hungry, a little sloppy, off-centre but true.

He can’t help it. Brad is in his head and there are points of comparison here. Ray is skinnier than Brad but harder, no give in the muscles of his arms and chest. He tastes of weed and Indian beer. He kisses Nate like he’s trying to climb inside him, like he’s trying to dig through him to find something potentially new and exciting.

Nate desperately wants to be something new and exciting to somebody, anybody. He finds himself dying to be reborn.

And this is just sex, not something spiritual and important, but Ray is beautiful and, in this moment, Nate feels beautiful too.

Together, they fumble his shirt up over his head. His ass hits the rickety table and Ray’s grasping his thigh to bring it up higher and he’s pushing at Nate’s combats, getting the button undone. He didn’t wear underwear; his dick is swelling and ready. He feels light headed and stupid-happy, grinning all over his face as he palms Ray’s jaw one-handed and pulls him into a kiss. Ray’s got his fingers curled around Nate’s dick, jerking him off hard and quick, practised and deft. Nate catches his wrist with his free hand and squeezes. 

“Not like this,” he says.

Ray’s grinning just as wide as Nate is, when he turns his head and catches the heel of Nate’s hand with a kiss.

“When was the last time you got fucked, Nate?”

But Nate just shakes his head; there’s no point of comparison here; this has nothing to do with Brad Colbert at all.

Now, they move with quiet purpose born of mutual agreement. Nate shucks his pants but stays on the table. Ray moves away but only for long enough to get out of his cut offs and come back with a tube of Astroglide in one hand and a condom between his teeth. Nate feels a flicker of nervousness. He’d never been a monk at Harvard, not close, but he had fucked people he’d gone on dates with, kissed with cautious care and eased himself backwards on a bed. On the table, he leans his back against the wall, knees up and legs spread. Ray leans with fingers already slick, one pressing against Nate’s asshole.

His breath catches.  
He sucks on Ray’s bottom lip.

Ray fucks him with one finger and looks into his face the whole time. Nate feels flustered and young, finds he’s looking at Ray’s mouth, his tattoos, the line of his neck and, only finally, only when his hips are already squirming against the table top, does he manage to actually look Ray in the eye.

The corner of Ray’s mouth quirks.

“Hey,” he says, and eases a second finger inside.

The drugs in his system make him feel light and easy, make him feel like his skin is bleeding light. He’s ready, he’s so ready. He bites his lip against a whimper. He says something that he thinks sounds like _please_.

By the time Ray pushes into him, Nate feels like his whole body is painted in lines of light. His hips jerk. He squirms. He arches. He holds onto Ray with two hard hands.  
"Oh fuck," he mumbles. "Oh, fuck me. C'mon. Fuck me. Please."

More than anything, he wants Ray to fuck his brains out.  
He wants to feel anything but whole.


	5. to experience an exotic landscape

He keeps his camera in his hand like a weapon, like something that's going to protect him. It's not really his scene. He discovered the party more or less by accident; the music found him through open shutters. He's here because it seems like exactly the kind of thing that people come to Goa for; the music and the full moon and losing themselves for a while. Brad's already lost enough; he's already afraid of never making it all the way back.

He's never been much of a dancer.

He takes maybe a handful of decent pictures, gets his camera up just in time to catch a girl spinning with both hands thrown up and out to the moon. Her palms are hennaed with elaborate patterns the colour of old pennies..her face was smeared with glow in the dark fingerprints. One girl daubed in glitter throws her arms around him and presses a smeary kiss to his cheekbone. He holds his camera at arm's length and takes a picture of them, temples touching.

When he sees Nate, he almost thinks that he's dreaming.

He stands and watches Nate dancing. He's surrounded by flailing limbs, elbows and knees and he's throwing himself into it completely, lost in it utterly. He's sweating through his shirt and there's sand clinging to him, streamers wrapped around him, hands up over his head, eyes closed. Brad's got no context for this and he's so fucking beautiful that, for a moment, he makes no sense at all.

Fuck it. Juli always said that Brad didn't know how to melt but maybe Nate Fick has heat that Jenni only ever dreamed of? And Brad's never been anywhere this warm before.

And he watches as somebody else gets there first, as this skinny, lithe guy with dark hair shaved almost to the scalp on the side wraps his ams around Nate so easily that he might have been doing it for years. If it wasn't for the sick ache in the pit of his stomach, Brad might think that he'd imagined the whole thing.

_#205: boys kissing. Bodies push and shove but they hold the centre of the shot. Lower bodies blurred, boots and sneakers, dark pants. Sweaty, they run into each other like water colours. But their mouths._

*

He’s angry more than anything. He’s angry that this could happen again; that this could be done again by somebody he barely knows, by someone who has no right to matter.

But does.  
Jesus.

It takes him a long time to find a still, unoccupied place. He can’t stand listening to the sound of teenagers fucking in the lush green. He closes his eyes and tries not picture how neatly Nate and that other guy fit together. It all gets muddled with Juli and Matt in his head. It all points to the Universe fucking him against and again.

In the hip pocket of his jeans, a letter than he still hasn’t had the balls to read. He’s been kidding himself that he doesn’t care what she thinks of him but how could that possible be true when he was so in love with her for what feels like most of his life?

When he wanted to be in love with her so fucking much.

*

_I still love you. Matt still loves you too. I'm just not in love with you anymore. I keep trying to remember what you used to be. When did you get so disappointed by everything, Brad? When'd you end up so cold? Listen: there is beauty in the world and you see that so take it as the gift it is and stop trying to IMPROVE all the damn time. The only person that you have to worry about disappointing is yourself._

_I don't want it to sound like I'm angry with you. I'm not angry with you, Brad. I just want you to remember than heat answers to heat, Ice-Man. And you've got to find a way to let it in._

_Live in the moment.  
Grow, if you can._

*

Discarded on the sand next to him is an empty water bottle. In the bottom of his camera bag, he finds a pen. He lies there for a long time, listening to the crickets and the night-birds in the trees. Decided, he writes his message on the back of Juli's letter and then he rolls it up and slots it into the bottle, funnels in enough sand to give it weight. He wades out until the warm water is lapping at his thighs. He throws the bottle as high and as far as he can.

He turns back to shore and looks at his camera, nestled in his shirt, safe and seemingly far distant.

*

  
**YES**.

*

Around dawn, the door opens. Brad lies on the bed and listens to Nate toe off his sneakers. The bulb in the bathroom flares into life. On the threshold, Nate is shirtless, the skin across his bare shoulders freckled, a new tattoo standing out reddened against his upper arm.

“Nate,” says Brad, pushing up and swinging his legs out but staying perched on the edge of the bed.

“I need to shower, Brad,” says Nate and Brad ignores the sudden weight in his chest that comes with the knowledge of why Nate would need to shower before the sun is even in the sky, even though he’s been up all night and Brad can hear that he’s weary without even looking him in the face.

“Please, Nate,” he says.

There’s a long pause. Brad can’t even lift his head.

Nate kills the bathroom light. Brad watches his jaw tighten, watches him scrub a hand back through his sweaty hair.

"Let me guess," he says, each syllable clipped and neat. "This is where you ask me where the fuck I've been and tell me how worried you've been? Fuck that, Brad. Fuck it. You don't get to decide when I come and go. Either we're in this or we're not but we are not, I repeat, _not_ playing at it. Because that's not what I want, Brad. That isn't why I'm here."

"It's not what I want either."

And then it's said. It's out there. It exists in the universe.

And he's fucking terrified.

Nate just stares at him. His mouth is a straight line.

"I fucked someone else," he says. "We danced and made out and then he took me home and he fucked me and it was all so much easier than being with you."

Brad let's his head hang again.

"You scare the shit out of me," he says. "There I was, trying to figure out how to nurse my broken fucking heart and then there you were, Nate. Do you even have any idea what it's like being around you? It's exhausting because, on top of being fucking _beautiful_ , you're brilliant and you're exacting and you're demanding without realising that you're doing it and it's impossible to live up to." Nate opens his mouth to say something but Brad feels like if he doesn't finish this now he never will. "I have no fucking idea how much I have to put into being in love with you right now, Nate. And I can't fucking bear the thought of it never being enough."

Nate sinks down onto his knees in front of him. The silver horseshoe around his neck. Brad desperately wants to feel lucky.

"I love you too, you fucking idiot," he murmurs.

The kiss, when it comes, is soft, almost gentle, but it doesn’t stay that way. Brad’s hand skims down the bare curve of Nate’s spine. The tips of their tongues touch. Brad imagines that he can taste something new and the image of Nate on his knees sucking someone else’s dick comes unbidden. He shoves it down immediately. It isn’t important. It’s as irrelevant of lining all of their history side by side and seeing how they measure up.

And fuck that. This is something entirely new. This has never happened in the world before, not in exactly the same way as it’s happening to them.

They fumble in the direction of the bathroom. They don’t talk, at least not with actual spoken words. He unbuttons Nate’s jeans and pushes his back against the tiles by his hipbones. Nate twists his fist in Brad’s thin t-shirt, palms his dick through his pyjama pants. He kisses Nate hard enough to bruise. Sucks on his bottom lip until Nate bites. Together, they pull his shirt up over his head, push their pants down enough that their dicks brush. Brad pushes into that damp friction. It takes him a moment to realise that that needy whine was him.

The water in the shower is cool as it spills over both of them. By silent mutual agreement, it’s Brad who turns to face the tiles. It’s been a long time since anyone pressed slick fingers into him and he finds himself trembling and nodding at the same time as Nate gets him ready or, rather, gets him _open_ because he can’t imagine ever being readier than this.

When Nate slides into him all in one push, Brad moans, low and broken. He tips his head back so that the water’s splashing full on his face. He gropes for Nate’s hand and, when he finds it, he holds onto it for dear life. He’s no less afraid, not really, but it does feel like he can feel his heart growing by degrees.

Afterwards, air-drying, they lie entangled on the bed, make-out and give lazy, heated handjobs like teenagers. Neither of them say it again but they don’t need to, not when it feels like it’s all around them, like the air is laced with it.

Nate's fingers brush against 'SEMPER FIDELIS' on Brad's bicep.

"Always faithful," he murmurs. Brad's in no way surprised that Nate reads a little Latin. "Why that?"

Brad turns his head and presses a kiss to Nate's hairline. Under the fan, his hair is almost dry.

"My Mom's dad was a Marine," he says. "I always wanted to shoot the Corps, but I ended up with rockstars instead." 

It sounds fucking stupid when he puts it like that. He's not at all phased when Nate laughs.

They doze for a while, wrapped up in each other. It feels like he's been decieving himself for years but there, with Nate and lighter than before, it feels like he might have finally figured out how to keep an always faithful heart.

*

_115° East_

Perth is greener than he expected. From the hotel room window, he loses track of the number of trees. They talked briefly about Thailand but decided against it; Bangkok had allure but Goa was close enough to Phuket for both of them. Moving in and of itself is never going to be enough but it was a start and they’d been still for long enough.

Time to go on.

Fresh from the shower, Nate sits cross-legged on the bed and counts left over rupees. Now that they’re out of India, they’re not worth the paper they’re printed on and Nate says he’s going to leave them in a corner of the hotel room in the hope that whoever sleeps here next is going the other way.

Without even thinking about it, Brad’s got his camera up, framing a shot of Nate’s hands, the brightly coloured bills, a glimpse of Gandhi’s face. He stops and forces himself to take a breath. He started documenting, no reason to stop now, but he has to start being honest with it. There’s no need to keep using it like a shield.

He puts one knee on the bed. Nate looks up at him and his smile flickers for a moment before it’s true. Brad’s been aware of this change between them: he hesitates because he’s scared of fucking up again and Nate’s cool because he’s scared that he ran too warm before.

So they change. And they meet in the middle.

Nate looks at him and Brad leans in, grazes a kiss against his smiling mouth. He shifts his grip on the camera.

“Right there,” he says.

_#211: A face in extreme close-up. Green eyes. Pink lips, slightly parted. A drop of water beaded on skin. And the look, the look._

*

“Like this.”

With his back against the headboard, Nate cradled between his knees, Brad covers Nate’s hands with his and changes his hold on the camera slightly.

“You need to be gentle with it.”  
“Like you’re gentle with me?”

Brad huffs a laugh and lifts the camera for both of them. The pad of his thumb grazes the full length of Nate’s index finger and he remembers that, in high school, he knew the names of delicate bones by heart.

Proximal, midal, distal.

Nate presses the button, takes a photo of the desk and the wall. It turns out to be out of focus but it’s not like it matters. It’s the thought that counts and, anyway, they’re removing Brad’s defences one brick at a time.

“Go sit in the chair,” says Nate, nudging Brad in the ribs with his elbow.

“Is that an order?”  
“You’d better believe it is, Colbert.”

_#213-220 A mix, some bad, some showing promise. He slouches, not really comfortable with being on this side of the camera. The sun slants in through the window and catches fair hair. A sudden smile. A blush. Lips parted as though by words. I love you, maybe, between the flash flare and the click whirr of the shudder and the beating of his heart._

*

It’s a pretty fucking amazing space. He leans back in the chair and looks up at the Christmas lights wound through the railings above. On the menu, it says that this place used to be a crocodile farm but what it is now is a great, cavernous space full of wonders and the beer is dark and cold.

Across from him, Nate finishes a slice of pizza. Brad might be imagining it but he thinks that Nate’s eyelashes actually flutter.

“Blue cheese and pear pizza is actually fucking awesome,” he says, grinning. “I am never doubting you again.”

Brad can’t help but be a little smug about that. He thinks ‘warmth calls to warmth’ and, for a moment, sitting there knee to knee even though there’s room to be otherwise, he genuinely feels it.

Their waiter is American, one of those sunny wide-open country faces that, even with the guileless look in those wide green eyes, Nate can’t hope to emulate. When he hears their accents, he brightens a shade. He’s from somewhere in Virginia that Brad’s never heard of but Nate nods anyway. Walt’s seemingly impressed when he hears that Nate’s at Harvard; he says that he kind of always dreamed of San Diego and has no idea how he ended up in Perth instead.

He’s sweet in a way that Brad could almost imagine Nate being, if he wasn’t so laser-focused on being smart instead.

At the end of his shift, Walt swings past their table to say goodbye.

“We were just about to leave anyway,” says Nate, glancing at Brad in a way that makes him feel more like part of a couple instead of an individual fumbling in more or less the right direction.

It’s kind of nice.

He nods. His fingertips brush against Nate’s knee under the table.

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “Come and have a drink with us.”

When they stand up, Nate’s palm grazes against his before their fingers intertwine.

*

Walt asks a lot of questions and Brad finds himself answering them more or less honestly. He talks about his apartment in San Diego, his work that takes him all over, his sister and how she’s just about the smartest kid he knows.

“What do you miss?” asks Nate, ostensibly to Walt but he’s looking at Brad when he says it. Walt talks about high school and his mom, the vague idea that he had once of joining the Marines (once again, Brad’s reminded that there’s nothing in the world but echoes).

Walt turns those clear eyes onto him.

“What about you, Brad?”

Brad shrugs.

“As long as I’ve got my camera, I’ll live,” he says but he knows that that’s not quite true anymore. He’s going to have to factor Nate into it. He’s going to have to figure out how it all works when they both stop moving. More than anything, he’s going to have to figure out how to be still.

*

“This is definitely the place?”

Nate nods; in the palm of his hand, there’s a slip of paper with a name and address written in Sharahah Bryan’s neat, flowing hand. _Go to Murphy_ , she’d said. _I’ll call and tell him to expect you. He won’t do it for free but he won’t fuck you either._

Brad remembers thinking that the curse would sounded dark and fantastic as it slipped past her painted lips.

They don’t hold hands but their shoulders brush as they walk down the alley. Wooden doors are folded back. A rank of beautiful bikes. Brad stops, for a moment. He can tell from the way that Nate’s looking at him that he doesn’t understand.

“Americans,” says a strongly accented voice. He’s standing in the doorway of the shop, cleaning the oil from a bike part with a scrap of white cloth. His hair tumbles dark and heavy around a lean, wolfish face. The dark lines of beautiful tattoos chase around his tanned forearms; Brad thinks that he recognises a line from Joyce. For a moment, he looks fierce but then he grins. Silver flashes in the corner of his bottom lip. He’s almost as distracting as the bikes.

“Just a guess. Shah’s got such a fuckin’ soft spot for Americans.” He sets the part on a work bench, wiping his fingers again before he offers Nate his hand. “James John Murphy. Murph.” There’s that grin again.

“Nate.”  
“You look very much like someone I used to know,” he says.

A possessive spark flares in Brad’s belly. His hand comes up to rest in the small of Nate’s back. He sees Nate glance at him, so quickly that it barely happens at all. He wonders if Murphy noticed.

Nate sits in the shade with Brad’s camera, idly taking shots of architecture and the sky while Brad and Murphy talk about bikes. Murphy talks about bikes the way Brad’s heard other guys talk about women; there’s a quiet reverence on every word and a light brush of his fingers against polished chrome. Brad finds himself liking Murphy in the same way that he liked Sharahah.

In the end he settles on a 1960 Indian Chief. It’s not flashy, not as fast as the Suzuki that he’s got in his lock-up in San Diego but it’s strong and it’s serviceable and Murphy’s got a contact that Brad can resell it to at the end of the trip. It’ll take them as far as they need to go.

They shake hands and Brad pays cash. The money here is like a fucking rainbow.

“Shah told me that I have to look after you,” says Murphy, sitting down to write Brad a receipt by hand in the cool, cluttered office. He pushes the weight of his dark hair back from his face. For the first time, Brad notices how it’s shot through with grey. Murphy’s older than he looks. “You could stay and eat with us. Head out for the bush in the morning.”

“We’d love to,” says Nate, before Brad’s even had time to think about it.  
It’s nice to have the decision taken out of his hands.

*

“We,” as it turns out, is Murphy and a boyfriend who says he’s a mechanic but looks more like a rockstar, tight black jeans and smeared eyeliner under tousled hair.

“I moonlight,” he says, flashing a grin over his shoulder as he cooks for the four of them. “That’s how we met, actually. I was up on stage with my fucking band and Murphy wasn’t paying any attention at all.”

“That smells amazing,” says Nate, hovering, a fresh beer in his hand and flushed colour in his cheeks that’s only half to do with the heat in the kitchen.

“Jack’s from Georgia,” says Murphy, slicing bread at the counter. “He feels like it’s his job to take care of everyone he meets.”

“Fuck you,” says Jack, but he’s grinning when Murphy leans in and cradles his face with tattooed fingers to kiss him. Nate drops down into the seat next to him. Brad runs one hand the length of the long muscle in his thigh. He watches the way the colour in Nate’s face changes and darkens. Sometimes, Nate looks younger than he is. Tonight, his hair is tousled and the beer is halfway to his lips and Brad’s realising that he never wants to be away from this guy, if only he could make it happen. 

His hand stays on Nate’s leg under the table.

*

They eat out on the roof, a cast-iron table, lights strung over-head. Nate and Brad sit shoulder to shoulder. Jack dishes out food and Murphy keeps the wine flowing. They’re good company, the two of them. Nate takes Brad’s hand under the table and Brad makes no attempt to take his hand back. 

“How’d you guys end up here?” asks Brad. They already know that Murphy and Jack have been together since Jack was eighteen. Brad’s got no idea how old Murphy is, but he knows that Murphy must be older than that. Jack glances across at Murphy and shrugs. Jack’s got one bare foot up on Murphy’s chair. Inexplicably, there’s glitter smeared on one cheek that catches the light.

“We decided to start moving,” says Murphy, reaching out to ruffle Jack’s hair with one hand. “This was just where we came to rest.”

_#225: Dancing. No music. Broad shoulders, dark hair above the nape of a tanned neck. One hand. Black painted nails. Ink on skin. YES I SAID YES I WILL YES. An inexorable surrender of sorts. Universal acquiesence. And lights over head._

He takes photograph of Nate, too. He takes one of Nate’s face in profile, beer bottle resting against his lip. He takes a close up of Nate’s hands, playing with the frayed knee of his jeans. Late, the wine all but drunk, he drops down next to Nate on the bench. He holds the camera at arm’s length. The photo is both a waste of time and utterly perfect at the same time.

*

He lies awake and listens to Jack and Murphy talking in the next room. They’re sleeping on a mattress dragged in the middle of the sitting room floor. Stripped down to boxers and t-shirts, they lie side by side in the dark. Outside, a streetlight hums and gutters. Nate stirs and moves closer, settling his head on Brad’s chest. A moment or two go by and then Brad lifts his hand and stirs his fingers through Nate’s hair. Nate sighs and shifts. His hand slips lower against Brad’s belly, stays with his fingertips against Brad’s waistband.

“Tell me about Harvard,” he says, because it’s easier than _tell me what you’re going to leave me for, in the end._

For a long time, Nate’s quiet. Brad listens to the rumble of traffic in the street, the low hum of Murphy and Jack. Nate takes in a shuddering breath and lets it out again.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, finally. “And it’s terrifying. Everyone’s so smart. And I’m smart, I am but…sometimes? I don’t know why the fuck I’m there, Brad. I don’t know what I’m doing.” He turns his head; the sharp tip of his nose rubs against Brad’s t-shirt. Brad cradles the back of Nate’s skull in the palm of his head. Maybe it’s the wine, but he can’t help but think about how babies are born with a hole in the skull, their dreams open to the air. Fontanel is such a fucking strange word. “I go to class, I write assignments, I read and read and fucking read and I just feel like I’m treading water. I don’t know when I’m going to get somewhere.” He swallows. Brad closes his eyes. “I’m so ready to fucking start.”

Brad knows how he feels. Brad’s spent years in the press-pit shooting shitty bands, moving from stage to stage when all he’s ever wanted to do is be on the ground where things are changing. It’s not that the world is consistently disappointing; he just wants to be there when it shifts. The when-it-all-changed. The point of no return.

Fuck San Diego. He’d be on the road for forever if that was what it took.  
But now there’s Nate. And everything’s different. It has to be. It is.

“Maybe Harvard isn’t it,” he says, quietly, his mouth against Nate’s hairline, bottom lip brushing against his skin.

“Maybe not,” says Nate, his voice sounding bruised and tired. “I just…need to figure out what is.”

So they both have things to figure out.  
It’s a pity that there aren’t roadmaps for this shit.


	6. or ease your fears

A fact: there’s a long, straight scar that runs almost the length of Brad’s left side, from below the waistband of his jeans up under his armpit. Nate lies alongside Brad and it’s early, so early, the light just starting to bleed in past the half-closed curtains and traces it with his fingers. He had managed to reach the age of twenty-five with no scars, nothing to show for his experience until he chose a tattoo. 

“What’s this?” he asks Brad and Brad smiles but doesn’t open his eyes.  
“I came off my bike when I was eighteen,” he says. “So I guess it’s proof of life.”

And Nate gets this tightness in his chest when he thinks about it: the bike skidding on wet tarmac, the tires squealing and, for a moment, Brad Colbert looking so small. He figures that the sudden weight in his chest comes from having never having really been in danger.

He’s never really let himself be tested.

Murphy’s up and making coffee and Jack’s still sleeping by the time they’re standing on the sidewalk. Nate’s wearing one of Brad’s t-shirts and he’s been trying to understand the very particular look on Brad’s face as he checks the bike over. It’s a look that he’s only ever seen on Brad’s face when he’s looking him straight in the eye.

Murphy comes out with coffee in paper cups. They drink it standing by the bike. None of them really talk but it’s a companionable sort of silence. When he’s done, he hands the cups to Brad and he slots them together. 

Brad offers Murphy his hand.

“Drive safe,” says Murphy, with a little smile. Nate finds himself sorry to be leaving. He thinks of Kerouac, something that he read once in a book that he hated.

Battered suitcases, longer ways to go. But no matter. The road is life.

*

His first time on a motorbike is both terrifying and exhilarating. He trusts Brad entirely but he can’t quite shake his fear of falling. They fly, or close to it. The road spills away beneath them. With his arms around Brad’s waist, his chest against Brad’s back, he imagines that the throb of the bike between his thighs is a heartbeat.

He turns his face into the wind. He closes his eyes and thinks about the way he’d ride his bike when he was a kid, throw himself down hills, build up speed on a long, straight stretch of road and then take his hands off the handlebars. He remembers the feeling of momentary weightlessness.

It takes almost an hour to talk himself into it. He lets go of Brad one hand at a time, stretches his arms out and flies. The wind hits him full in the face and a laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep inside him. For a moment, it’s difficult to breathe.

Maybe he’ll make it home without any scars, but he’s different, all the same.  
He believes in Brad more and more.

*

The storm hits and they end up walking, wheeling the bike between them. The rain is so different than it was in India. There’s a chill to it and he’s soaked to the skin and shivering by the time they get to the hostel. Brad’s got the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up but, underneath it, his short hair is damp and tousled. One of Brad’s arms snakes around Nate’s waist, pulling him closer and both of them are soaked to the skin but, in that moment, Nate’s never felt so warm.

At the desk, Nate thumbs his credit card out of his wallet and pushes it across to the clerk. Brad raises an eyebrow. Nate shrugs and hides a grin in the cuff of his sweatshirt.

The room is basic; a bed, a dresser, a shower which squeaks and splutters. The rain pours down. Nate leans against the dresser and watches as Brad strips out of his sweatshirt and his t-shirt, strips out of everything until he’s standing there in his briefs and then he strips out of those too. Brad Colbert stands stark naked, nothing but his tattoos and that long scar and then he crosses the space between them and he presses the long line of his body forward against Nate’s.

“This is the furthest I’ve ever been from home,” murmurs Brad, close enough that his lips graze against Nate’s. And Nate supposes that that’s true of him, too. They’re so close to halfway around the world. Pretty soon, they’ll be heading back the way they came.

His fingers follow the line of Brad’s spine down to the garish splash of colour across the base of his back.

He could see the value in retracing his steps.  
They kiss slowly, lazily. His palms slide over Brad’s bare skin. Brad’s hands are busy, peeling Nate out of his damp clothes, pushing his sweatshirt down over his shoulders. Nate’s never been comfortable with his own nudity in the way that Brad is. He’s learning to be comfortable, though. He peels his own shirt over his head and they kiss like that, bare chest to bare chest. Through denim, he can feel Brad getting harder; he knows that Brad can feel him too.

They do nothing in echo.  
They move in perfect time.

Nate finds himself unwilling to lie down. With his back pressed against the wall, he fumbles his jeans down around his thighs so that, when he rocks his hips, his dick grazes against Brad’s. He gasps against Brad’s mouth. For a moment, his head feels dizzy and light. Their fingers touch and overlap. They stroke together, they move together, and Nate kisses skin wherever his mouth touches. Brad’s skin tastes of sweat and rainwater. It’s not going to take long, he can feel it. He closes his eyes and breathes against Brad’s skin. He sucks up a mark on Brad’s shoulder and, when he comes, he bites.

Afterwards, he smooths the mark with the pad of his thumb.

“Sorry,” he says.  
“Don’t say sorry,” says Brad. When Brad leans in for a kiss, his fingers twist and tug in Nate’s hair. Nate stays lose.

They line down side by side on the bed, touching at the tips of their fingers and the length of their thighs. Falling asleep, Nate hears Brad murmur _I love you_.

He presses his lips against Brads skin and whispers it back.

*

The colours here are as different as the rain. The dust on Nate's boots is almost black as he sits on the porch and watches Brad. The rain started up again about five minutes ago and, since the first drops, Brad's been out there turning this way and that. Nate sits and watches as he strips his shirt off and slicks his hair back from his face and then just stands there, arms out-stretched and the rain beating down on his chest and shoulders. He spins slowly and Nate thinks of sycamore trees and helicopter seeds.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he calls, still dry in the lee of the porch, with the dust turning to mud a foot away. Brad’s barefoot. He’s going to need a shower. Nate could stand to shower again.

"Getting lost," says Brad, fingers clenching and unclenching, head tipped back, a fucking stupid shit-eating grin on his face, somehow beautiful despite it. "Coming back."

And Nate can accept that, he really can, just as long as Brad stays in plain sight.  
He pushes up off the step and walks towards Brad. The rain’s heavy enough that he’s soaked to the skin in seconds. He peels his shirt off and drops it in the mud.

“What are you doing?” asks Brad, laughing. 

Nate steps in in a way that he hopes is smooth; he thinks that maybe he saw it in a movie once.

“I’m going wherever you’re going,” he says.  
It feels sort of like a promise.


	7. to risk the unknown

_115° East:_

King’s Cross in Sydney is not dissimilar from King’s Cross in London, from what he can recall. He wonders if places can be intrinsically linked. He wonders if there’s always something in a name. At the hostel they dump their bags on a metal framed bed that’s pretty much the only furniture in a narrow room. When he sits down to retie his boots, the bed springs squeal horrendously which feels partly like a threat and partly like an invitation.

Nate peels his shirt over his head to change it and, grinning, Brad reaches out and snags him by the belt loops, tugs him in for a kiss – a brief, damp tangle of tongues and lips.

“Let’s go out,” he says.  
They don’t have to see Murphy’s buddy right away. They can hold onto the bike for a few days yet.

*

His first glimpse of the famous harbour comes through glass; the train breaks above ground and ratta-tattas across the bridge and he sits there, one arm draped around Nate’s shoulders, Nate’s frame tucked in against his side. Neither of them talk. Neither of them really need to anymore. Not all the time, anyway. Or, at least, that’s how it’s starting to feel.

At dusk, the lights are just starting to come out in the city, one the bridge and the skyline and the scalloped edge of the Opera House itself. Like Time Square or the Valley of the Kings, it’s a place that he’s seen photographed so many times that it has almost ceased to feel real. He pulls away from Nate long enough to get his camera up. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know what needs to be documented most carefully: entering a place or leaving it.

Beginnings or endings or something in between.

It seems incongruous: an amusement park tucked into the bowl of the harbour. He’s seen the view opposite so many times that it seems almost impossible that he didn’t know that this place existed. While Nate buys ice-cream and a package of donuts, Brad finds himself a seat on the wide steps. He watches the little boats come and go. There’s a chill in the air and he huddles in his sweatshirt. When Nate drops down to sit beside him, he can feel the heat coming off him. When Nate leans in to kiss him, his mouth is chill and sweet.

They sit in companionable silence. Nate writes a postcard to his mom and Brad almost writes one to his sister but decides to text her at the last minute.

> Everything here feels new x

“What are you thinking about?” he asks Nate after neither of them have moved in a few long minutes.

“I’m thinking,” says Nate, rubbing his fingers over his smile. “Just…some places…a photograph can’t do them justice? Like the Taj Mahal. But some places…” He spreads his hands to take in the view. “Some places, it’s a little like stepping _into_ a photo and. It’s just a little overwhelming.” He shrugs. “It’s like I’ve seen this place so many times that I thought someone made it up all along and it’s surprising to find out that it’s really here.” He looks up at Brad, that glass-green graze level and amused. “It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid.” He remembers having that feeling of a place being not quite real at the most unlikely times. Setting foot onto a boat hostel in Amsterdam, fairylights strung between the military surplus bunks, he’d felt it; his life shifting to accommodate some new knowledge of the world. There was something of that every time he set foot in Time Square or Piccadilly Circus. Dublin had a lot of that about it. The night that he met Nate it was so obvious that he could taste it. What has become clear is this: that every place and every experience has a hand in shaping you and that there are some journeys that take place in more than physical time.

The sleeve of Nate’s sweatshirt is frayed and they sit linked by the fingers while Brad pulls at those loose threads and idly thinks about the letter that he might write to his sister, if either of them were the type. He’s already figuring out how to explain Nate to the people who’ve loved him his whole life. He leans in and tugs Nate closer.

Behind them, the Ferris Wheel turns slowly, lit towards morning.

*  
The bike shop couldn’t be more different from Murphy’s; an empty concrete lot with a ramshackle office, one door standing open and the inside dim and unreadable. On the forecourt, a bike spilling its oily guts across a tarpaulin and a woman crouching, her hair wrapped in a gypsy coloured scarf. Her bare, brown arms were tattooed to the wrists. On a chain around her neck, she wore a pair of rings and a tiny silver human heart.

She looks like she knows what she’s doing with the bike.

“Can I help you guys?” she asks, brushing a tendril of her hair back from her face. She’s got oil smeared on her cheekbone.

“I was told you guys could take a bike off my hands,” says Brad, hands in the pockets of his jacket. “You’re Tony?”

Her smile is broad and white and beautiful. She shakes her head, straightening up and wiping her hands on the seat of her pants.

“Not quite,” she says, offering her hand. “Gina Espera. Tony’s my guy.” She shakes both their hands and then glances over her shoulder towards the office. “Hey! Poke!”

Poke looks more like a Marine than a mechanic, shaved head and dark, watchful eyes. He walks out of the office and, for a moment, Brad’s not sure which way this is going to go. He nods hello but it’s the bike that he’s interested in. He goes over it carefully while the three of them stand and watch. Eventually, he straightens up and turns to face them.

“Well, dawg,” he says, in solemn tones. “She’s not a patch on my girl right here, but she’ll do. I can take her off your hands.”

Poke, as it turns out, has a smile that matches his wife’s. He agrees to a fair prince on the bike; it’s not quite what Brad paid for it but it’s close enough, given the extra miles and a tug on the heart strings. Brad lingers, for a moment, his hand resting against chrome and leather. It’s difficult to explain how it feels to leave a bike behind. It’s something like loss. It’s not quite akin to grief.

He just takes a moment to say goodbye.

Gina unwraps her hair and it tumbles down around her shoulders, thick and raven, shot through with a little silver. Whatever there is left in Brad that’s an artist flares up.

“Can I take your picture?” he asks her, as she’s leaning her weight across the rickety desk to handwrite him a receipt.

When she was younger, his sister had postcards depicting goddesses thumb-tacked to her bedroom door. In profile, that’s what Gina most reminds him of: the aquiline slope of her nose, the tight line of her jaw and the touch of silver at her throat. She’s not exactly what Brad would call beautiful, not really, but it doesn’t get in the way of her being drop-dead stunning, all the same. She’s a good model, too, turning her head smoothly, catching the light easily. Dimly, Brad’s aware of the conversation that Nate and Poke are having.

“Shit, son,” says Poke. “When I was your age? I didn’t care about nothin’ and I was too lazy and too stupid to learn a goddamn thing. Took Gina to turn me around. Love is a powerful thing, man. Love is the motherfuckin’ drug.” Brad imagines that white grin; he can’t help but wonder how they got onto this subject in the first place. “It’s not all on Gina, though. I loved three things, my whole life.” 

“Yeah?” says Nate, and Brad can tell from the tone of his voice that he’s hanging on every word.

“Engines, my girl and the Marines,” says Poke, still grinning. “Listen, man: one thing leads to another. Whole wide world’s built on a circle. You’ve just got to find what does it for you. Gotta find what makes you want to jump.”

Instinct kicks in. Brad turns just in time to get a picture of the look on Nate’s face.

*

It’s difficult not to be constantly aware of it; the way that something big is getting ready to end. They’ve come as far as they can together. It’s time to start heading back. Fuck retracing their steps, though. In the harbour, eating gourmet ice-cream, Brad thinks about the Pacific, the ocean where he learned to surf, a body of water that he thought he knew intimately. And how everything feels brand new.

In the aquarium, they hold hands like teenagers. Brad watches Nate watching platypus play like kittens. The look on his face is the right side of goofy but only just.

He shrugs when Brad touches his ribs with his elbow.

“I always thought they’d be bigger,” he say. Brad shifts behind him and wraps both arms around him. He lands a kiss on the side of Nate’s neck, right against his pulse. He imagines that he feels it leap and then level.

_#320: In silhouette from behind. The breadth of his shoulders, narrowing down to his waist. The tilt of his head. Behind glass, box jellyfish under red light throb like beating hearts. He reaches out with one hand like he could touch them, like it might be possible to cradle another person’s pulse in the palm of his hand._


	8. Interlude: Pacific

Sometimes it strikes him exactly how much of the world and everything is unknown. They leave sunrise behind them, knowing that they’ll see 9.30am Sunday again. For a while, their shadow chases them, winging its way across the water. Soon, though, night comes down, inky and still. Brad sleeps quickly and easily in the narrow seat, a skill which is enough to make Nate jealous. Listlessly, he flips through movies that he’s not going to commit to. He reads a few pages of his books but feels guilty about the glare of the overhead light. He reaches out and presses one hand against Brad’s ribs for a moment, just to feel him breathe.

In the end, he lifts the window blind, feeling like he’s doing something faintly illicit. He presses the tip of his nose against the window. He can feel the barely pushed out chill, the old, high up-cold of altitude. So many stars, above and reflected below so it’s like they’re barrelling through a tunnel. And Nate Fick was never a boy who dreamed of being an astronaut, but only because he could never quite figure out what he wanted to believe.

A shooting star catches his eye. Rationally, he knows that it’s just a meteor in the atmosphere, neat but not even remotely romantic, but, with Brad sleeping next tot him and everything about to change, he’ll take what he can get. He rests his forehead against the glass. He wishes, not for him and Brad because he figures that either they’ll find their way or they won’t and it won’t be through lack of trying. Nate keeps that wish to himself, feeling selfish and pleased in equal measure and then he settles down, next to Brad but not touching. He closes his eyes and tries to trick his brain into sleeping.

*

After thirteen hours on a plane, L.A feels like a foreign country. Yes, the accents are familiar but nothing looks quite like he remembers it but, then again, he’s only been on the west coast once before. He twists his fingers in brad’s until his knuckles are white. He feels like he’s clinging to him for dear life.

In the baggage hall, he feels like he’s shouldering more than one bag’s worth of weight. He finds himself watching Brad’s face intently because he knows that Brad’s come full circle now, all the way around again and that means that, suddenly, anything is possible again.

“I suppose I ought to get myself on a flight to Boston,” he says, pretending to be more relaxed than he could ever feel right now. Teetering on the edge it feels hard to keep his balance and he won’t lose everything that he’s worked so hard to gain. He will not. But everything’s shifting.

“Probably,” says Brad and Nate’s heart sinks but then Brad drops his duffle and turns, palm grazing against Nate’s cheek as he leans in for a small sweet kiss.

Right then, it feels like Brad might be the only real thing in the world. Nate grips his biceps with both hands.

“Or,” he says, both echo and agreement.

*

The apartment feels unlived in but there are signs of Brad everywhere. He’s written all over it. Spare but not quite Spartan; somehow, Nate had been expecting bike parts over every spare surface, not framed photographs on the walls and a couch that gives pleasantly when he drops down onto it. Brad barely gives him time to settle before he’s on the couch too, one knee between Nate’s thighs, spilling half into Nate’s lap, untidy and hot as he frames Nate’s face with his hands. Nate’s lost count of the times that they’ve fucked since Venice, all of the many, many ways to feel good, but he knows that it’s different, this time. Teetering. Changing. 

He remembers something that William Gibson wrote.  
There’s always a moment of when-it-all-changed, isn’t there?

He’s always found those kinds of books difficult to understand until now.


	9. to bear witness to the consequences

_117° west:_

It would be cliché to say that nothing’s different when everything has changed. Nate’s changed; Brad can see it in the emails that they write, shooting stupid shit back and forth across three thousand some miles. He made his decision – the PhD wasn’t enough. He signed up for the Marine corps. Brad spoke to him about it on the phone and tried not to sound terrified.

Nate sends a weekly letter from Quantico, tells terrifying stories about training exercises. 

Brad dreams that he’s drowning for a week straight. His fingertips barely graze Nate’s through murky water. He reads all of the letters more than once and then bundles them together in a wire rack on his desk. He’s always liked small things which prove their usefulness.

(Once or twice, he cradles his cellphone between cheek and shoulder and jerks off while he listens to Nate breathe and moan. He cups his free hand to his mouth just so he can exhale and feel it bounce back at him and pretend that it’s Nate that’s closer).

In the end, though, it’s the Reporter that comes through. He’s going to Iraq, embedding with Recon Marines. He’s managed to bargain a seat for Brad, too. He’s going to need photos for his article. It’s the sort of thing that careers shift and change on.

He manages to stay more afraid for Nate than he ever is for himself.

*

_A girl, standing on a dusty road, a refugee column, an exodus happening behind her, but this girl is beautiful, veiled in black and gold and the tilt of her chin is defiant. Suddenly, it’s not so clear what’s the difference between liberation and invasion._

_Whoever said that a picture is a thousand words was only half right.  
A picture is a conversation._

_He calls it "punk may be dead but..."_

*

They still have separate apartments but, as far as Brad knows, Nate’s stateside for less than twenty-four hours when he lets himself in with a key that’s been in his pocket for almost a year. He stands in the hallway, tanned and neat in his uniform. He looks older. Brad figures that they both do. He probably needs to shave. He hadn’t known exactly when Nate would be there, so he’s standing there in the hallway in sweats with the newspaper in his hand.

“I feel like I ought to salute,” he says.  
Nate grins and Brad feels like he recognises him a little more. Not everything’s different.

“You could’ve showered.”  
“I thought I’d wait for you.”

The newspaper hits the floor.

Brad spent serious money on the bathroom in the apartment. The shower is huge and bright, water sluicing down from overhead like rain. For a moment, they stand there, both of them naked and under the full flow, just looking at each other. Brad lifts one hand, his fingertips ghosting over Nate’s hip, but he doesn’t actually touch him. He closes his eyes and feels the heat coming off his skin, licks his lip. He opens his eyes and stands stock still as Nate swipes his thumb against the air over his cheekbone.

Brad finds himself holding his breath.

They slide closer until they’re chest to chest. His dick grazes against Nate’s thigh. His breath’s against Nate’s cheek. Nate’s hand slides up until it’s at the back of his neck, squeezing, and that gives him something to focus on just when he thinks he’s about to fall apart.

Whoever said that familiarity breeds contempt never spent as long as Brad does waiting for the familiar to return.

“Turn around,” he murmurs, his mouth against Nate’s lips. His thumb brushes against the tattoo on Nate’s bicep. He asks Nate to turn around and he feels this strange, sharp tug in his chest because he wants to keep looking at Nate for as long as he can. But he’s got other plans.

He presses Nate against the tile and sinks down onto his knees, mouths down Nate’s spine and lingers with his lips against his tailbone. He presses his nails into the paler skin of Nate’s thighs. He groans softly because it’s been months and it feels like all that he’s been thinking about is this. Over the water, he hears Nate sigh, soft, as he shifts his hips.

“I love you,” murmurs Brad, and lets his mouth wander lower.

For a few long minutes, there’s no sound but the shower and Nate’s moans. His fingernails press hard enough to leave red crescents on Nate’s skin. He concentrates on the work of his mouth and tongue and ignores the throb of his cock. It doesn’t feel possible that he could be getting harder than he already is. It doesn’t feel plausible that he could want Nate more than this.

He goes slowly. He lingers. By the time he’s pressing his fingers into Nate, Nate’s moaning almost constantly, his hips riding back, one hand reaching to cradle Brad’s head.

“Please,” he says.  
Brad leans his forehead against Nate’s skin, sucks and bites as he fucks Nate with his fingers and thinks _Iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou_ to the rhythm of his pulse.

They’re still dripping as they ease each other down onto the bed. Nate lies on his back, feet up, knees spread and Brad’s eyes linger, for a moment, on his dick, flushed and thick and darker than the skin of Nate’s belly. Staring, he rolls a condom down over his dick. He knows that Nate’s watching. He imagines Nate wearing a shirt and making do in the desert and then he crawls onto the bed with him, lowers himself down. He presses so close that there’s not even room for a breath between them. His mouth grazes against Nate’s.

“I missed you,” he murmurs, shifting, pressing against Nate. He fumbles, dragging Nate’s knee higher against his hip. When he imagined this, over and over again, he always thought he’d be so smooth. It ceases to matter, though, as he slips inside, not fucking Nate, not yet, but inside him, as close as they could possibly get. So close that he’s not even sure where he ends. 

Nate’s back arches, his heels digging into the bed, knees cradling Brad’s hips. They’re both still for a moment. They’ve got so much to get used to.

“I always miss you,” says Nate.

They don’t talk, after that. There’s no mumbled pleasantries, no dirty words, not even whispered I-love-yous. He catches his weight on his forearms on either side of Nate’s head and fucks him slowly, fucks him deeply. They look each other in the eyes the whole time like they’re trying to keep each other in memory. Like they’re trying to fix each other in space.

Because they’re both gone more than they’re here, these days.  
And they have to know how to come back.

When he’s close to coming, he bends his head, breathes against Nate’s cheek. Nate’s hands tighten on his shoulders. It’s nowhere on any map that Brad’s ever seen before. He sucks up a mark on Nate’s shoulder.

Nate’s body is zero degrees.  
Brad feels himself align.

*

He stands on the deck, back to the rail and watches Nate talking to Jenni in the kitchen. Earlier that evening, he’d sat at the foot of the bed, pulling on his boots, and watched as Nate buttoned his vest and pushed his fingers through his hair. He’d tucked the silver horseshoe inside his shirt.

“We don’t have to go. I doubt Juli would even notice.”

Raising an eyebrow, Nate had dropped down onto one knee, brushing Brad’s fingers away and fastening his boot for him.

“Time to man up, Brad,” he’d said.

Smirking against his beer-bottle, Brad watches as Nate leans in to say something to Juli . She laughs. Irrationally, he feels jealous because he wanted to be the one who made her laugh forever and, earlier, he struggled just to shake her hand. There’s no point in being jealous where Nate’s concerned, he knows that; he trusts Nate completely.

It’s taking a while to get used to that feeling again.

“Brad,” says a familiar voice.  
Brad watches Nate for a moment longer before he looks away.

“Hey, Matt,” he says.  
“I just wanted to say, man,” says Matt, and Brad knows what’s coming. What’s coming is apologises and justifications and ‘here’s the story of how we ruined your life’. What he respects most about Juli is that there was none of that. She told him what was happening, and she told him his part in it and then she left him alone to mend. It’s past the time for excuses. The hurt is starting to fade. 

The last swallow of his beer goes down cold.

“Do you love her?”

There’s a long pause. Matt’s had this habit of pulling at his hair while he thinks since he was a kid. He pushes his fingers into curls and tugs and then he nods.

“More than anything.”  
So maybe it’s enough.

“See that guy she’s dancing with?” he says, pointing with the hand still holding the empty bottle and waiting for Matt to follow his eyeline. Matt, he can tell, is jealous of Nate.

“Yeah?”

There’s another beer on the rail and Brad twists off the cap and takes a long swallow.

“I almost missed out on him because I was so busy being fucked up. And I’m done, Matt. I’m done.” He offers Matt the beer that he’s barely touched and pushes away from the rail.

“Brad?”  
“I’ll see you later, Matt.”

He slips into the house. On the walls, there are photos of Juli and Matt wind-surfing and hiking. He pauses, for a moment, and looks at them. On the walls of his apartment, there are photos of the Taj and the harbour and the buildings reflected in the square and, somewhere in most of them, there’s Nate Fick. He looks at the photos for a long moment and then he starts walking. He’s going to cut in and dance with the girl that he thought he’d spend the rest of his life with.

And then he’s going to go home with the man who came instead.


	10. the desire to travel seems characteristically human

They lie in bed, reading. Sometime around his last birthday, Brad finally admitted that he needed reading glasses. He pretty much only wears them in bed. Sometimes, he catches Nate grinning at him out of the corner of his eye. He swats at him with one hand. He got a galley of Evan’s book in the mail the other day. It’s good, so far. Sometimes, he thinks he recognises himself.

“Listen to this,” says Nate, shifting against the pillow to get himself more comfortable. “May the gods grant you all things which your heart desires, and may they give you a husband and a home and gracious concord, for there is nothing greater and better than this -when a husband and wife keep a household in oneness of mind, a great woe to their enemies and joy to their friends, and win high renown.”

Grinning, Brad discards both book and glasses on the bed beside him and leans across to steal a kiss.

“In that scenario,” he says, lips against Nate’s, “which one of us the wife?”  
“Don’t be an asshole, Brad.”

But there it is; Nate's up to his eyes in Homer and Brad feels like he's been on an odyssey of his own. He feels like it's been a long time but he could maybe find Ithaca on a map again.


End file.
